Black Mountain College tested an experimental style of education, which consisted of talented students and teachers who worked towards an environment that was both freeing and fulfilling, and who eventually became known as the Black Mountain Poets. The creative philosophy of "projective verse" was very influential to the poets at Black Mountain. With projective verse, the emphasis falls on the creation of the poem, not necessarily the poem in completion. Noteworthy poets from the movement include Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan.
Background
Black Mountain College students on campus
The Black Mountain College was founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, as well as other faculty who had, in the previous spring, been fired from Rollin's College. Despite the College's somewhat brief existence (1933 to 1957), the free, non-rigid atmosphere and ideals that took root have left a lasting impact in the world of art. The experiment was met with "uncommon vitality and responsiveness." It was a four-year college, and set up as an experimental “education in a democracy” system with an emphasis on the importance of the arts in developing intellect. The college aimed to educate the student in head, heart, and hand; in addition to their studies, students and faculty “participated in work on the farm operated by the college. They constructed buildings, did maintenance work, served meals, etc,” as a way to experience living and working within a small community. The college was experimental in nature in that it was owned and operated by the faculty. An Advisory Board lent counsel to the community but had no legal authority. Decisions were based on consensus rather than a vote...grades...as a measure of education were abolished...Graduation was based on achievement of a project in the student's area of specialization.[1] This unbound system encouraged great creativity in both the students and the teachers, and ultimately produced performers and poets who become known as the Black Mountain poets.
Black Mountain Style
While the work of each Black Mountain poet is notably different, they shared "creative philosophies that came to be known as 'projective verse'." Focusing on the process of creating a poem rather than the product, the term was coined in 1950 by Black Mountain teacher Charles Olson in collaboration with other Black Mountain poets. [2] The goal was to reintroduce musicality into poetry. The poets felt that they had "suffered from a ascendancy of the metrical foot over the syllable and the breath" and which could be corrected by scoring a piece of poetry like a piece of music "to preserve the poet's unique breath." Differing from what was disparagingly termed as 'closed' style, "...the 'projective,' or 'open,' verse...aims to transfer energy from the world to the reader without artificial interference, syntax is shaped by sound, not sense; sense is conveyed by direct movement from one perception to another, not rational argument; and the reader's rendition directed by freely varied spacing between words and lines on the page."[3] Another transformative aspect of Black Mountain verse is that it stretched the reader's involvement in the creative process and demanded the use of everyday language.[4]
Charles Olson's manifesto, “Projective Verse”, illustrates a set of rules or guidelines for this new poetry (also called open verse). Continuing the ideas of Ezra Pound, who encouraged poets to “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome” and also those of William Carlos Williams, who put forth the poem as a “field of action,”[5] Olson proposed a system based upon breath, rhythm, and energy: "a poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge." In order to bring musicality and rhythm in, Pound also relies on the concept that the look of the poem itself is an extension of the ideas within the poem. Pound believes that every part of the poem should incorporate the ideas that the poet is trying to share. He also stresses the importance of the head, ear, syllable, heart, breath, and line: "it is from the union of the mind and the ear that the syllable is born. But the syllable is only the first child of the incest of verse. . . . The other child is the LINE. . . . And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath. . . ." Robert Creeley translates this into: "What he is trying to say is that the heart is a basic instance not only of rhythm, but it is the base of the measure of rhythms for all men in the way heartbeat is like the metronome in their whole system. So that when he says the heart by way of the breath to the line, he is trying to say that it is in the line that the basic rhythmic scoring takes place. . . . Now, the head, the intelligence by way of the ear to the syllable—which he calls also 'the king and pin'—is the unit upon which all builds. The heart, then, stands, as the primary feeling term. The head, in contrast, is discriminating. It is discriminating by way of what it hears. It is also important to note that Olson wrote on a typewriter, comparing its mechanical precision to “the stave and the bar” of the musician and insisting that it allows the poet to “record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work."[6]
Influential Black Mountain Poets
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley was born in Massachusetts in 1926 and raised by his mother and sister. Though blind in one eye from an accident when he was four, he served in the American Field Service during the war in the mid-40's. He attended Harvard though never graduated. About this time began correspondence with two lasting influences on his poetic style and identity - William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson. Creeley had strong ties to Black Mountain College in the 1950's, and became known as a "Black Mountain Poet". He also began editing The Black Mountain Review. Together with his close friend Olson, Creeley developed the concept of "projective verse" based on his idea that “form is never more than an extension of content." After a marriage ending in divorce, Creeley returned again to Black Mountain College. Though he traveled, taught, and resided at various institutions throughout his writing career, Creeley's poetic roots of his Black Mountain era would not be soon forgotten. "Creeley kept for five decades a way of writing whose markers include parsimonious diction, strong enjambment, two to four-line stanzas and occasional rhyme. What changed over his career was not his language but the use he made of it, the attitudes and goals around which the small, clear crystals of his verse might form[7] . Creeley's writing was well known throughout Black Mountain College by teachers and students who were stunned by his "sparse, subtle, and indirect writing...[with] no familiar ear-sounds or sight boundaries of conventional and expected plot and character, no social consciousness with a social message...no signposts pointing in any directions previously known to me[8] ." Teachers such as Charles Olson read his poems and stories to his classes at Black Mountain.
Denise Levertov
Denise Levertov
Denise Levertov is an American poet who was born in Britain. When she was 12 years old, Levertov was already thinking of poetry and sending poems to T.S. Eliot. By the time she was 17, her first poem was published. In 1956, Levertov became a naturalized United States citizen after she and her husband immigrated to New York where they later had a son. Her move to America changed her view of poetry and the world when she was introduced to the transcendental ideas of Emerson and Thoreau. She also found inspiration in the works of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. She came to work at the Black Mountain College through her husband's association with Creeley. At Black Mountain College, Levertove developed an "open, experimental style." Though she refused association with any poetic school, she often associated with the Black Mountain group of poets especially Creeley, Duncan, and Olson. Levertov became an important part of the avant-garde poetry with a highly regarded body of work that "reflects her beliefs as an artist and a humanist[9] ," having published more than twenty volumes of poetry and four books of prose. She spent her last years in Seattle, Washington, where she continued to write[10] .
Paul Blackburn
Paul Blackburn
Paul Blackburn was born on November 24, 1926 in Saint Albans, Vermont. After that, Blackburn lived with his maternal grandmother who "required little pretext for whipping him regularly[11] ." At 14, he joined his mother and her lover, Paul's "aunt" Carr, in New York where his interest in poetry was encouraged. Blackburn attended New York University, but left to join the army in 1946 and returned to the school in 1947. After his return, Blackburn was influenced by his teacher M.L. Rosenthal. He also gained an appreciation for the work of Ezra Pound, who ultimately helped Blackburn publish his first major work, "The Innocents Who Fall Like Apples." Through Pound, Blackburn began a correspondence with Robert Creeley. With the help of Creeley, he came into contact with other Black Mountain poets, including Olson, and Levertov. Many of their ideas were shared concerning Olson's ideas about projective verse. Robert M. West notes that Blackburn was especially skilled with the techniques of projective verse: "adjusting line breaks, margins, and spacing to reflect his desired reading pace and breathing patterns." Despite Blackburn's collaboration with them, including working as a distributor for Creeley's magazine, Black Mountain Review, he resisted the label of "Black Mountain Poet," seeing as he never attended the college or really left New York.
Robert Duncan
Robert Duncan
Robert Duncan was born in Oakland, California in 1919 and adopted shortly after. His parents' philosophy for raising him as a child influenced his later work including his appreciation for the occult. He decided as a young man to become a poet, which led him to study at Black Mountain College for a brief period. Many of his most well-known poems were influenced by his Black Mountain College period and associated with this style of poetry. Duncan envisioned poems as mysterious, waiting to be unearthed and studied for understanding. “I work at language as a spring of water works at the rock, to find a course, and so, blindly. In this I am not a maker of things, but, if maker, a maker of a way. For the way is itself," he explained. One of the first literary figures to come out as gay in the 1940's, he was also highly involved in politics. After being discharged from the military due to his sexuality, Duncan moved to San Francisco and studied at Berkeley. He taught at Black Mountain College in the late 1950's and here began writing his "projective verse," a style above mentioned that mirrors the poet's breath[12] .
Visual and Performing Artists
Asheville (1952)
The Abstract Impressionist artistic movement gained momentum in the post-WWII era, and notable pioneers of the art form, including Robert Motherwell[13] , Willem de Kooning[14] , and Franz Kline[15] , were associated with the Black Mountain College as instructors in the 1940's, 50's, and 60's. The list of artists, both visual and performing, who were associated with Black Mountain College and the development of the art forms related to it is very extensive, but includes names such as Shoji Hamada (ceramist), Buckinster Fuller (architect and engineer), and Agnes de Mille (dancer and choreographer). A comprehensive list of faculty and students can be found in the book "The Arts of Black Mountain College" by Mary Emma Harris[16] .
Willem de Kooning
De Kooning's painting "Asheville" is based on his teaching experience at Black Mountain. It is "A small but extremely complex work, it gathers together numerous, often oblique allusions, including references to the college and sections that recall de Kooning's early training in crafts such as marbling, woodgraining, and lettering"[17] . De Kooning made four different versions of "Asheville" and the technique shows his finesse with creating the visual impression of collage without adding textured material. The completed work de Kooning created jumps and visual ruptures between passages that mimic collage[18][19] .
Merce Cunningham
Merce Cunningham
Merce Cunningham was born April 16, 1919 in Centralia, Washington and is considered one of the fathers of avant-garde choreography and dancing. The second of three sons, both his older and younger brother followed their father into the legal profession. Cunningham's first formal training came from the Cornish School of Arts in Seattle when he was 20 years old. While dancing there, he was discovered by Martha Graham who invited Cunningham to join her company. He moved to New York in 1939 and remained there dancing as a soloist in Graham's company for six years. There he met his life partner, John Cage, who composed Cunningham's first solo and who Cunningham remained with until Cage's death in 1992. Cunningham began teaching at the Black Mountain College in 1953 and started his own dance company, The Merce Cunningham Dance Company. In his lifetime, Cunningham choreographed over 200 dances and 800 events. He even danced in his own events into his early 70's. He died peacefully in his home in New York on July 26 just months after his 90th birthday.[20]
Videos
This video shows previous students talking about their experience with the experimental college. According to this youtube video on the “Black Mountain College” wiki, Merce Cunningham actually took part in the first “happening” at college, which was a new and wonderful performance arranged by John Cage where music, dancing, and poetry all took place at once. In the video. The stage at Centralia Community College is dedicated to Merce Cunningham.
Images are used in accordance with fair use practices. If you hold copyright to an image, and do not agree that its use accords with fair use practices, please contact the wiki's creator and organizer. Drafting (Phase I)
X Locate relevant written sources (online and/or print) (keep track of source info) X Locate relevant images, videos, audio files (keep track of source info) X Develop your own discussion of the topic, using source materials to get started (use a mixture of paraphrase and quotation—avoid over-long quotations) X Structure page: (1) opening summary, (2) factual material, (3) interpretive material, (4) other items of interest, (5) external resources, (6) references (nos. 2-4 may vary depending on material) X Position images and videos around where they should go X Create internal links (no new window) to other pages on wiki, external links (new window) to relevant web materials X Insert and format references (paraphrases and quotations should be cited—in reference, name of page or site is hyperlinked—don’t simply append web address at end of, or instead of, reference)
Revising (Phase II)
X Check credibility of sources and external links (avoid Wikipedia and sources that look biased or amateur) X Assess your global structure (is this the best order for your materials?) and revise accordingly X Assess the structure of each section (paragraph development? order of paragraphs?) and revise accordingly X Look for material that isn’t relevant to the topic and cut it X Look for sections that go long and explore whether you should (a) trim them down, and/or (b) break them into paragraphs and/or subsections Look for sections that are short and explore whether you should flesh them out (remember that anything from class discussion, journal writing, essay work, and mini-lectures—no need to cite me—can be used as raw material) X Make sure your discussion is in a consistent and objective tone Look for redundancies with other pages (connect with that workgroup and decide how to resolve)
Editing (Phase III)
X Edit all prose for clarity, concision, and correctness X Make sure transitions within sections are smooth (anywhere you’ve added, cut, or moved material may need a new transition) X Decide where to put visual and audio materials and whether/how to wrap text around them (try to make the page pleasant to look at) X Make sure image and audio files are internal (have been uploaded to the wiki) X Make sure section headings are clear, concise, and accurate (all pages should have, as their last two sections, “External Resources” and “References”—the opening summary has no heading) X Look for missed opportunities to link to wiki pages and external resources (make the link) X Make sure links to external pages open in a new window X Make sure images have appropriate captions (photographs—name of person, place, or thing; artworks—title of work and (in parentheses) date completed) X Make sure summary is brief but substantive (capture the two or three most important points) Make sure links in External Resources section are accurate, brief, and descriptive X Make sure References section begins with “fair use” disclaimer Make sure references are in correct format
[fill these spaces yourselves]
Formatting and Polishing (Phase III)
Proofread for correctness, clarity, and concision (everyone in group should proofread the page) X Begin Summary with name of person, movement, concept, or condition, in boldface X Standardize heading format (main headings: Heading 1 and a horizontal rule; then Heading 2, Heading 3, and so on) X Standardize fonts (Arial at 100% text size) X Standardize “fair use” disclaimer (same format as used on “Cubism” page) Look for spots where wikispace glitches have caused format problems (see “Guy at Front of Room” for instructions on how to resolve glitches)
Creeley's writing was well known throughout Black Mountain College by teachers and students who were stunned by his "sparse, subtle, and indirect writing ...[with] no familiar ear-sounds or sight boundaries of conventional and expected plot and character, no social consciousness with a social message...no signposts pointing in any directions previously known to me."[[image:i/icon_16_numbersquare.png width="16" height="16" caption="Reference - double click to edit"]] Robert Creeley Teachers such as Charles Olson read his poems and stories to his classes at Black Mountain.
Background
The Black Mountain College was founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, as well as other faculty who had, in the previous spring, been fired from Rollin's College. Despite the College's somewhat brief existence (1933 to 1957), the free, non-rigid atmosphere and ideals that took root have left a lasting impact in the world of art. The experiment was met with "uncommon vitality and responsiveness." It was a four-year college, and set up as an experimental “education in a democracy” system with an emphasis on the importance of the arts in developing intellect. The college aimed to educate the student in head, heart, and hand; in addition to their studies, students and faculty “participated in work on the farm operated by the college. They constructed buildings, did maintenance work, served meals, etc,” as a way to experience living and working within a small community. The college was experimental in nature in that it was owned and operated by the faculty. An Advisory Board lent counsel to the community but had no legal authority. Decisions were based on consensus rather than a vote...grades...as a measure of education were abolished...Graduation was based on achievement of a project in the student's area of specialization.[1] This unbound system encouraged great creativity in both the students and the teachers, and ultimately produced performers and poets who become known as the Black Mountain poets.
Black Mountain Style
While the work of each Black Mountain poet is notably different, they shared "creative philosophies that came to be known as 'projective verse'." Focusing on the process of creating a poem rather than the product, the term was coined in 1950 by Black Mountain teacher Charles Olson in collaboration with other Black Mountain poets. [2] The goal was to reintroduce musicality into poetry. The poets felt that they had "suffered from a ascendancy of the metrical foot over the syllable and the breath" and which could be corrected by scoring a piece of poetry like a piece of music "to preserve the poet's unique breath." Differing from what was disparagingly termed as 'closed' style, "...the 'projective,' or 'open,' verse...aims to transfer energy from the world to the reader without artificial interference, syntax is shaped by sound, not sense; sense is conveyed by direct movement from one perception to another, not rational argument; and the reader's rendition directed by freely varied spacing between words and lines on the page."[3] Another transformative aspect of Black Mountain verse is that it stretched the reader's involvement in the creative process and demanded the use of everyday language.[4]
Charles Olson's manifesto, “Projective Verse”, illustrates a set of rules or guidelines for this new poetry (also called open verse). Continuing the ideas of Ezra Pound, who encouraged poets to “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome” and also those of William Carlos Williams, who put forth the poem as a “field of action,”[5] Olson proposed a system based upon breath, rhythm, and energy: "a poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge." In order to bring musicality and rhythm in, Pound also relies on the concept that the look of the poem itself is an extension of the ideas within the poem. Pound believes that every part of the poem should incorporate the ideas that the poet is trying to share. He also stresses the importance of the head, ear, syllable, heart, breath, and line: "it is from the union of the mind and the ear that the syllable is born. But the syllable is only the first child of the incest of verse. . . . The other child is the LINE. . . . And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath. . . ." Robert Creeley translates this into: "What he is trying to say is that the heart is a basic instance not only of rhythm, but it is the base of the measure of rhythms for all men in the way heartbeat is like the metronome in their whole system. So that when he says the heart by way of the breath to the line, he is trying to say that it is in the line that the basic rhythmic scoring takes place. . . . Now, the head, the intelligence by way of the ear to the syllable—which he calls also 'the king and pin'—is the unit upon which all builds. The heart, then, stands, as the primary feeling term. The head, in contrast, is discriminating. It is discriminating by way of what it hears.
It is also important to note that Olson wrote on a typewriter, comparing its mechanical precision to “the stave and the bar” of the musician and insisting that it allows the poet to “record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work."[6]
Influential Black Mountain Poets
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley was born in Massachusetts in 1926 and raised by his mother and sister. Though blind in one eye from an accident when he was four, he served in the American Field Service during the war in the mid-40's. He attended Harvard though never graduated. About this time began correspondence with two lasting influences on his poetic style and identity - William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson. Creeley had strong ties to Black Mountain College in the 1950's, and became known as a "Black Mountain Poet". He also began editing The Black Mountain Review. Together with his close friend Olson, Creeley developed the concept of "projective verse" based on his idea that “form is never more than an extension of content."After a marriage ending in divorce, Creeley returned again to Black Mountain College. Though he traveled, taught, and resided at various institutions throughout his writing career, Creeley's poetic roots of his Black Mountain era would not be soon forgotten. "Creeley kept for five decades a way of writing whose markers include parsimonious diction, strong enjambment, two to four-line stanzas and occasional rhyme. What changed over his career was not his language but the use he made of it, the attitudes and goals around which the small, clear crystals of his verse might form[7] .
Creeley's writing was well known throughout Black Mountain College by teachers and students who were stunned by his "sparse, subtle, and indirect writing...[with] no familiar ear-sounds or sight boundaries of conventional and expected plot and character, no social consciousness with a social message...no signposts pointing in any directions previously known to me[8] ." Teachers such as Charles Olson read his poems and stories to his classes at Black Mountain.
Denise Levertov
Denise Levertov
Denise Levertov is an American poet who was born in Britain. When she was 12 years old, Levertov was already thinking of poetry and sending poems to T.S. Eliot. By the time she was 17, her first poem was published. In 1956, Levertov became a naturalized United States citizen after she and her husband immigrated to New York where they later had a son. Her move to America changed her view of poetry and the world when she was introduced to the transcendental ideas of Emerson and Thoreau. She also found inspiration in the works of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams.She came to work at the Black Mountain College through her husband's association with Creeley. At Black Mountain College, Levertove developed an "open, experimental style." Though she refused association with any poetic school, she often associated with the Black Mountain group of poets especially Creeley, Duncan, and Olson. Levertov became an important part of the avant-garde poetry with a highly regarded body of work that "reflects her beliefs as an artist and a humanist[9] ," having published more than twenty volumes of poetry and four books of prose. She spent her last years in Seattle, Washington, where she continued to write[10] .
Paul Blackburn
Paul Blackburn
Paul Blackburn was born on November 24, 1926 in Saint Albans, Vermont. After that, Blackburn lived with his maternal grandmother who "required little pretext for whipping him regularly[11] ." At 14, he joined his mother and her lover, Paul's "aunt" Carr, in New York where his interest in poetry was encouraged. Blackburn attended New York University, but left to join the army in 1946 and returned to the school in 1947. After his return, Blackburn was influenced by his teacher M.L. Rosenthal. He also gained an appreciation for the work of Ezra Pound, who ultimately helped Blackburn publish his first major work, "The Innocents Who Fall Like Apples." Through Pound, Blackburn began a correspondence with Robert Creeley. With the help of Creeley, he came into contact with other Black Mountain poets, including Olson, and Levertov. Many of their ideas were shared concerning Olson's ideas about projective verse. Robert M. West notes that Blackburn was especially skilled with the techniques of projective verse: "adjusting line breaks, margins, and spacing to reflect his desired reading pace and breathing patterns." Despite Blackburn's collaboration with them, including working as a distributor for Creeley's magazine, Black Mountain Review, he resisted the label of "Black Mountain Poet," seeing as he never attended the college or really left New York.
Robert Duncan
Robert Duncan
Robert Duncan was born in Oakland, California in 1919 and adopted shortly after. His parents' philosophy for raising him as a child influenced his later work including his appreciation for the occult. He decided as a young man to become a poet, which led him to study at Black Mountain College for a brief period. Many of his most well-known poems were influenced by his Black Mountain College period and associated with this style of poetry. Duncan envisioned poems as mysterious, waiting to be unearthed and studied for understanding. “I work at language as a spring of water works at the rock, to find a course, and so, blindly. In this I am not a maker of things, but, if maker, a maker of a way. For the way is itself," he explained.One of the first literary figures to come out as gay in the 1940's, he was also highly involved in politics. After being discharged from the military due to his sexuality, Duncan moved to San Francisco and studied at Berkeley. He taught at Black Mountain College in the late 1950's and here began writing his "projective verse," a style above mentioned that mirrors the poet's breath[12] .
Visual and Performing Artists
Willem de Kooning
De Kooning's painting "Asheville" is based on his teaching experience at Black Mountain. It is "A small but extremely complex work, it gathers together numerous, often oblique allusions, including references to the college and sections that recall de Kooning's early training in crafts such as marbling, woodgraining, and lettering"[17] . De Kooning made four different versions of "Asheville" and the technique shows his finesse with creating the visual impression of collage without adding textured material. The completed work de Kooning created jumps and visual ruptures between passages that mimic collage[18] [19] .Merce Cunningham
Cunningham began teaching at the Black Mountain College in 1953 and started his own dance company, The Merce Cunningham Dance Company. In his lifetime, Cunningham choreographed over 200 dances and 800 events. He even danced in his own events into his early 70's. He died peacefully in his home in New York on July 26 just months after his 90th birthday.[20]
Videos
This video shows previous students talking about their experience with the experimental college.
According to this youtube video on the “Black Mountain College” wiki, Merce Cunningham actually took part in the first “happening” at college, which was a new and wonderful performance arranged by John Cage where music, dancing, and poetry all took place at once. In the video.
The stage at Centralia Community College is dedicated to Merce Cunningham.
External Links
"America" by Robert Creeley
Arts at Black Mountain College
"Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community" click "download full text"
Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College Museum
Denise Levertov's Poems
"Food for Fire, Food for Thought" by Robert Duncan
"Fully Awake" a documentary about Black Mountain College
"Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow" by Robert Duncan
Paul Blackburn Biography
Paul Blackburn's Poems
"Projective Verse" by Charles Olson
Robert Creeley at Black Mountain
Robert Creeley in 1954 a studio recording at Black Mountain College
References
Images are used in accordance with fair use practices.
If you hold copyright to an image, and do not agree that its use accords with fair use practices,
please contact the wiki's creator and organizer.
Drafting (Phase I)
X Locate relevant written sources (online and/or print) (keep track of source info)
X Locate relevant images, videos, audio files (keep track of source info)
X Develop your own discussion of the topic, using source materials to get started (use a mixture of paraphrase and quotation—avoid over-long quotations)
X Structure page: (1) opening summary, (2) factual material, (3) interpretive material, (4) other items of interest, (5) external resources, (6) references (nos. 2-4 may vary depending on material)
X Position images and videos around where they should go
X Create internal links (no new window) to other pages on wiki, external links (new window) to relevant web materials
X Insert and format references (paraphrases and quotations should be cited—in reference, name of page or site is hyperlinked—don’t simply append web address at end of, or instead of, reference)
Revising (Phase II)
X Check credibility of sources and external links (avoid Wikipedia and sources that look biased or amateur)
X Assess your global structure (is this the best order for your materials?) and revise accordingly
X Assess the structure of each section (paragraph development? order of paragraphs?) and revise accordingly
X Look for material that isn’t relevant to the topic and cut it
X Look for sections that go long and explore whether you should (a) trim them down, and/or (b) break them into paragraphs and/or subsections
Look for sections that are short and explore whether you should flesh them out (remember that anything from class discussion, journal writing, essay work, and mini-lectures—no need to cite me—can be used as raw material)
X Make sure your discussion is in a consistent and objective tone
Look for redundancies with other pages (connect with that workgroup and decide how to resolve)
Editing (Phase III)
X Edit all prose for clarity, concision, and correctness
X Make sure transitions within sections are smooth (anywhere you’ve added, cut, or moved material may need a new transition)
X Decide where to put visual and audio materials and whether/how to wrap text around them (try to make the page pleasant to look at)
X Make sure image and audio files are internal (have been uploaded to the wiki)
X Make sure section headings are clear, concise, and accurate (all pages should have, as their last two sections, “External Resources” and “References”—the opening summary has no heading)
X Look for missed opportunities to link to wiki pages and external resources (make the link)
X Make sure links to external pages open in a new window
X Make sure images have appropriate captions (photographs—name of person, place, or thing; artworks—title of work and (in parentheses) date completed)
X Make sure summary is brief but substantive (capture the two or three most important points)
Make sure links in External Resources section are accurate, brief, and descriptive
X Make sure References section begins with “fair use” disclaimer
Make sure references are in correct format
[fill these spaces yourselves]
Formatting and Polishing (Phase III)
Proofread for correctness, clarity, and concision (everyone in group should proofread the page)
X Begin Summary with name of person, movement, concept, or condition, in boldface
X Standardize heading format (main headings: Heading 1 and a horizontal rule; then Heading 2, Heading 3, and so on)
X Standardize fonts (Arial at 100% text size)
X Standardize “fair use” disclaimer (same format as used on “Cubism” page)
Look for spots where wikispace glitches have caused format problems (see “Guy at Front of Room” for instructions on how to resolve glitches)
Creeley's writing was well known throughout Black Mountain College by teachers and students who were stunned by his "sparse, subtle, and indirect writing ...[with] no familiar ear-sounds or sight boundaries of conventional and expected plot and character, no social consciousness with a social message...no signposts pointing in any directions previously known to me."[[image:i/icon_16_numbersquare.png width="16" height="16" caption="Reference - double click to edit"]] Robert Creeley Teachers such as Charles Olson read his poems and stories to his classes at Black Mountain.
"Robert Creeley". Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 2011. Web. 16 Feb. 2012.
"A Brief Guide to the Black Mountain School". Poets.org. The Academy of American Poets, 1997-2012. Web. 16 Feb. 2012.
"Essay On Poetic Theory: Projective Verse (1950)". Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 2011. Web. 16 Feb. 2012.
"Charles Olson". Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 2011. Web. 16 Feb. 2012.
"Robert Creeley." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 2011. Web. 16 Feb. 2012.
Rumaker, Michael."Robert Creeley at Black Mountain". JSTOR. Duke University Press, 1978. Web. 16 Feb. 2012.
"Denise Levertov ." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 2011. Web. 16 Feb. 2012.
West, Robert M. "About Paul Blackburn". Modern American Poetry. N.p., 1999. Web. 16 Feb. 2012.
"Robert Duncan". Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 2011. Web. 16 Feb. 2012.
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